Conquerors

by Roger Crowley

  It seems to me that Your Highness should strive to be addressed as Emperor of the Indies…because the kings of Kilwa and Mombasa…and Malindi and Mogadishu…are calling you their lord and they your vassal…and on the other coast [of India] you have royal and peaceful forts and nothing goes across the sea except under your protection; Batecala [Bharkal] and Honnevar [Honavar] have promised me that they will be your vassals and pay you…so nothing could be more just or more rightfully earned than that Your Highness should take the title.

  At the same time, Almeida was aware of his inability to fulfill all the instructions given in the regimento. Having prioritized the construction of fortresses and the dispatch of spices, he wrote to Manuel, “I have decided, My Lord, not to go to the Red Sea this year, although it’s the thing I most desire in the world,” citing the need to get the forts securely in place and the required timely loading of the spice fleets completed before proceeding further. Meanwhile, the samudri remained an unsolved problem.

  When the letter reached Lisbon, in the middle of the following year, the king ordered Masses to be said and ceremonial processions throughout the land, and contemplated the construction of a series of monumental tapestries to celebrate the great events that sealed the creation of the State of India—the coronation of the king of Kilwa, the taking of Mombasa, the fort construction along the Malabar Coast—grandiose forms of self-promotion. The pope considered granting him the title of Most Christian King. In the interim Manuel’s ambitions had vaulted on; and in May 1506, Christopher Columbus, the agent of Spain’s rivalry with Portugal, died in Valladolid still convinced that he had reached the Indies.

  12

  “The Terrible”

  January 1506–January 1508

  WHILE FRANCISCO DE ALMEIDA worked to stabilize a profitable Indian empire, in Lisbon King Manuel had been changing his mind about the command structure. The king’s management of affairs on the other side of the world, which he could hardly envisage and which involved long delays of communication, was riddled with contradictions. His orders to Almeida had been querulously detailed, but the king was prey to doubt and the pressures of his envious cabal of courtiers. Manuel was incapable of distinguishing men of true merit from the inept, the corrupt, and the self-interested. Duarte Pacheco Pereira, whose exploits in Cochin had single-handedly saved the whole Portuguese enterprise over the winter of 1503, sank into obscurity on his return. Even before he’d received Almeida’s first account of his work, Manuel had decided on the new man to replace him. Afonso de Albuquerque shared and magnified Manuel’s belief that he was destined by God to sweep Islam out of the Indian Ocean and to regain Jerusalem. Albuquerque was now to become his chosen instrument.

  On February 27, 1506—an exact year after Manuel had publicly expressed total confidence in Almeida—the new man signed a secret document:

  I, Afonso de Albuquerque, declare that I have taken my oath to our lord the king, in his presence, that I will divulge to none the provision made regarding the captaincy of India, now held by D. Francisco [de Almeida], against the latter’s return to these realms or in case of his death—which document I hold and may reveal to no man until such time as it should take effect and I remain in tenure of his office.

  Manuel was already appointing him to take over from Almeida almost three years later with the title of governor, a lesser power than viceroy, but this information was to be kept secret until the appointed time. In the meantime, he wrote to Almeida to notify him that Albuquerque was empowered to impinge on regions and activities that he had previously given to the viceroy’s sole charge in the western half of the Indian Ocean. This overlapping of authority was destined to create confusion and antagonisms in the years ahead. Meanwhile Manuel’s tone toward Almeida, influenced by the snide tittle-tattle of returning captains and the malevolence of court rivals, was becoming increasingly sharp.

  The spice fleet being prepared for the spring of 1506 was to consist of fifteen ships, under the overall command of Tristão da Cunha. Nine of those were under his direct authority, accompanied by Albuquerque with six more. The whole fleet was intended to enter the Indian Ocean and establish a presence on Socotra, a small island near the mouth of the Red Sea that was believed to be controlled by Christians and, thus, an ideal base for stamping out Islamic traffic bound for the Muslim markets of Egypt and the Middle East.

  Lisbon was a dynamic, brawling, and turbulent place in the early years of the century. With the wealth of the Indies pouring into the wharves on the banks of the Tejo, entrepreneurial merchants, tradesmen, sailors, and chancers came to the “New Venice,” attracted by the smell of spices and the demand for luxury items. If much of the waterfront was being laid out in a grand imperial style to reflect the aspirations of the Grocer King, it was also a city of squalor and hysterical passions. In January 1506, plague broke out, probably brought up the Tejo on ships. Soon it was carrying off a hundred a day, and the king considered evacuating the city; by April he had removed his court to Abrantes, ninety miles away. The mood was fraught; Masses were said for deliverance from plague; hooded penitents stalked the streets. It became difficult to fill the ships of the fleet. No one wanted to sail with men from Lisbon.

  The Lisbon waterfront

  As April 5, the date set for departure, approached, the fleet was at Belém as usual, undertaking the rituals of departure. Albuquerque was compelled to sweep the prisons to make up the numbers, which added an additional combustible element to the expedition. The crews were unruly and violent. Albuquerque was to declare that there were more scuffles and knife fights on board his ships than in the whole of Salamanca. A ruffian crew that combined a deep hatred of Muslims with experience of violent piracy would prove hard to contain. On the intended day of departure, Albuquerque had another problem. His pilot, an experienced navigator named João Dias de Solis, failed to turn up. Solis had chosen that moment to murder his wife and flee over the border to Spain. Albuquerque, never one to underestimate his own talents, decided to steer the ship himself. “I presumed I could take my ship to India as well as the best pilot in the fleet.” A fortnight after they had sailed, Lisbon reached a flashpoint. The New Christians, recently converted Jews who had been allowed to stay in the city, were accused of heresy and of spreading the plague. A hysterical mob led by Franciscan monks turned on them in the streets. Two thousand died in the pogrom before order could be restored.

  Cunha and Albuquerque were related, but the expedition was no more harmonious than that which Albuquerque had shared with his cousin Francisco in 1503. The two men chafed against each other. Albuquerque, who was subordinate to the appointed commander but whose confidence in his own abilities had been further increased by his secret appointment, was temperamentally incapable of bowing to anyone. From the larger Portuguese point of view, their mission was a commercial disaster. The fleet was hit by storms, almost doubled back to the African coast, delayed by Cunha’s impetuous desire to explore the newly discovered island of Madagascar, sidetracked by plundering the Somali coast. It took sixteen months to accomplish a task that should have taken six. Socotra, the first stated objective, nominally Christian, was in fact a Muslim stronghold and had to be stormed. It turned out to be strategically useless for patrolling the mouth of the Red Sea and barren of supplies to support its new garrison. In the process, Cunha missed the 1506 sailing season to the coast of India and the loading of spices.

  Elsewhere, the Mamluk naval expedition that had set out in 1505 was moving at a similarly leisurely pace. The commander, Hussain Musrif, was evidently in no hurry to confront the Franks, and his expedition had multiple tasks to perform along the way. The fortification of Jeddah, of which he was also the governor, was his first priority—in particular, overseeing the construction of robust defenses against the possibility of Portuguese attack. The danger of a strike against Mecca, at that moment being proposed in Lisbon, was sufficiently alarming to ensure that the whole of 1506 was spent in the Red Sea. There were also revolts among the Bedouin to be
crushed. It was not until May the following year that the Jeddah defenses were complete.

  The effects of this initial campaign had been attritional. Desertions and combat losses had reduced the original twelve ships to six by the time they reached Aden, in August 1507. Bad news from the Indian Ocean continued to filter back to Cairo. “Latterly the audacity of the Franks knows no bounds,” wrote the chronicler Ibn Iyas. “More than twenty of their ships dare to plow the Red Sea, attacking merchant vessels from India, waiting in ambush to attack convoys, seizing cargoes, so that a lot of imports are stopped. It’s extremely difficult to acquire turbans and muslin in Egypt.” But there was full confidence that a pan-Islamic alliance fired by the spirit of jihad and additional help from the samudri would be sufficient to crush the intruders.

  Meanwhile, as Almeida’s fleet continued to damage Muslim commerce along the Malabar Coast, the merchants of Arabia were diverting their ships to other spice markets. An increasing number were striking south to the low-lying atolls of the Maldives, where they could take on food and fresh water before sailing on to Ceylon. Almeida sent his son to cut off the Maldives route, but the navigators missed their way; currents carried Lourenço’s ships south to Ceylon, where they made the first Portuguese landing, established a treaty, and planted a cross.

  For the viceroy, however, the picture was darkening. All of Manuel’s expansionist plans depended on maintaining a stable base on the Malabar Coast, and this rested not only on a disciplined naval force, with its unanswerable bronze cannons, but also on prestige. It was essential that the perceived advantages of trading with the Franks remained high among the network of city-states. During 1506, confidence in the Portuguese was starting to falter.

  Within a couple of months of its construction, the Anjediva fortress was found to have been a mistake. Wherever they went, the incomers were intruding on a vested interest. Here it was the preserve of the sultan of Bijapur, whose ships forced passing traffic into his own port of Dabul to pay customs dues. He was not about to tolerate an interloper. At the start of the monsoon season a carefully timed attack, led by a Portuguese renegade, put the fort under siege. Three ships were burned before the news of Lourenço’s imminent arrival forced a withdrawal, but it was clear that the fort was unsustainable: too close to hostile Bijapur, too short of natural resources. At the end of the year, Almeida took the decision, without reference to Manuel, to abandon and dismantle the structure. It was a riposte to the wisdom of the grand plan, and it did not go down well. At the same time, it gave hope to Muslim merchants that the Portuguese could be dislodged.

  Two more serious blows followed. The Portuguese had brought an unprecedented level of polarization and militarization to the affairs of the sea. To those loyal to the newcomers, who in time included some of the Mappila merchants—the indigenous Muslims of the Malabar Coast, particularly in Cochin and Cannanore—they pledged protection to shipping and issued safe-conduct passes, on the presumption that the Indian Ocean was to be a Portuguese monopoly. It was in the fulfillment of this duty that Lourenço was convoying ships north toward the port of Chaul at the end of 1506. Stopping along the way to dismantle the Anjediva fort, he had anchored near hostile Dabul when some Muslim merchants, identifying themselves as natives of friendly ports, came aboard to plead for help. Their richly laden ships from Cochin and Cannanore had been in Dabul’s port, where a larger contingent of Mecca ships had subsequently docked. These were now planning to sack the ships of Portugal’s allies. The visiting merchants begged for Lourenço to lose no time in launching an attack.

  Lourenço was determined to fight but was bound by instructions from his father to convene a captains’ committee before deciding on battle. That evening at table, they voted by a majority of six to four against action: they were concerned that the request might be a trap, that the river mouth in which Dabul lay was unknown to them, that they might not be able to retreat, and that, anyway, they had been ordered to convoy ships to Chaul. It might have been prudence or it might have been spite; there were experienced captains ill-pleased to obey the viceroy’s twenty-five-year-old son. Lourenço listened in stunned silence. He accepted the verdict and withdrew, but not before he had prudently extracted signed statements from the dissenters as to their votes. Elsewhere on the vessels there was fury from the knights and seamen itching for a fight and the chance to win booty.

  The inevitable happened. The friendly merchantmen were sacked and their crews killed. Calicut ships fired mocking shots as they sailed past the fort at Cannanore. For the first time, the Portuguese had flunked a fight. The refusal to protect their ships was taken badly in friendly Malabar ports. Almeida was appalled by the news. He court-martialed all the captains, including his son. Those who had voted against were imprisoned, demoted, and returned to Portugal. A question mark remained against Lourenço’s name.

  The Dabul incident cast a long shadow. The historian João de Barros summarized its consequences for captains and commanders: “that in decisions about whether to fight…so that honorable deeds may be done, even if dangerous, they must not raise objections based on the personal safety of their lives.” Henceforward prudence was impossible. No one felt able to refuse an engagement, however rash, without accusations of cowardice. Only bravery of the most explicit kind would suffice. The honor code of the fidalgos was accentuated to the extent of an emphasis on hand-to-hand combat over the distant destruction of cannon fire.

  An even more serious loss than the Dabul incident befell loyal local merchants over the winter of 1506. Tristão da Cunha’s fleet failed to arrive. For the first time since Vasco da Gama’s first visit in 1498, no fleet came from Lisbon to buy spices. The ports of Cannanore and Cochin were well stocked with merchandise they were unable to sell. Merchants began to rue the monopoly pact with the Franks and yearn for a return to the reliable Mecca trade.

  Cannanore was particularly disaffected. Its Muslim community was dismayed by the growth of the Portuguese fort and well understood its implications. Merchants feared that their profitable horse trade with the Persian Gulf might be about to vanish. The Portuguese had started to seize boatloads from Ormuz, and the merchants had lost a valuable cargo of elephants, destroyed by Lourenço during an attack on hostile Quilon. Lourenço’s probe in the direction of the Maldives and Ceylon only increased their disquiet. There was apparently no limit to the incomers’ ambitions. They began to fear for all their markets. Within the city itself, the Portuguese were starting to disrupt the social hierarchy and to flout its mores. Women of low caste were consorting with the men of the garrison; the development of mixed communities, in which people were being converted to Christianity, fueled Muslim resentment, and the temptation for the incomers, craving red meat, to kill the occasional cow only increased tensions with the Hindus. The ruler of Cannanore wrote to Manuel more than once about his disquiet that “the sugar of the Portuguese friendship would turn to poison.”

  When the ruler of Cannanore died, in April 1507, the samudri used his influence to place a more sympathetic candidate on the throne. It was just at this moment that a number of bodies washed up on the city’s beach, among them that of the nephew of a prominent Muslim merchant. The finger of blame pointed directly at a Portuguese captain who had intercepted a local merchant ship, declared its safe-conduct pass to be a forgery, even though signed by Almeida’s garrison commander, and killed the crew. Before dumping them in the sea he had wrapped the bodies in sails to ensure that they sank, only for the current to work them loose and present them to their grieving relatives.

  It was the signal for a wide-ranging Malabar revolt. Eighteen thousand warriors converged on the city; the samudri sent twenty-four cannons. The fort, positioned on a headland, was cut off from any relief from land—and provision from the sea was becoming difficult.

  In the Indian Ocean, the monsoon dictated the rhythm of everything: when ships could sail, when wars could be fought, when the spice fleets could arrive and when they must depart—missing a critical moment could c
ost months. Opponents of the Portuguese quickly worked out that an enemy dependent on sea power was vulnerable once storms came. They timed their attacks accordingly. During April, the weather started to worsen.

  It was Good Friday when the news of the attack on Cannanore reached Cochin. Almeida, realizing that time was now tight, wasted not a moment. He went from house to house calling for people to bring out food and arms. A mystery play was in performance in the church; men dressed as Roman centurions guarding Christ’s tomb had to give up their greaves and breastplates on the spot. With rising seas, Lourenço took what could be found and set sail to Cannanore. He had time to unload men and materials before the winds mounted and he was forced to sail back to Cochin, leaving the fortress captain, Lourenço de Brito, and some four hundred men cut off by the monsoon weather to withstand a furious siege. It was still under siege in August when Cunha and Albuquerque, having taken and garrisoned the forlorn island of Socotra, went their separate ways: Cunha to India, a year late with the spice fleet, Albuquerque to patrol the Arabian Sea. It was Cunha’s ships that relieved the starving Cannanore garrison at the end of the month, finally breaking the anti-Portuguese coalition there.

  —

  Cunha and Albuquerque had hardly been on speaking terms when they parted at Socotra. Albuquerque was impatient and furious. He was left with six worm-eaten ships, rotting equipment, short supplies, and just four hundred men. As a final snub, Cunha had sailed off with all the trumpets, essential for staging displays of prestige and power in foreign ports and for rallying troops in battle. Albuquerque had not only to provide food for his crews but also to return supplies for the undernourished garrison left on Socotra.